Five eastern Sudanese opposition leaders held, transferred to Khartoum

Officers of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) in Sennar have transported five opposition leaders to Khartoum on Thursday.

On Wednesday evening, NISS agents summoned Abdallah Adam, Deputy-head of the National Umma Party (NUP) in Sennar, Yousif El Naeem, Spokesman for the NUP Sennar, Zaroug Mahjoub, leading member of the Democratic Unionist Party in the state, Haidar Hadi, Chairman of the Sennar branch of the Communist Party of Sudan (CPoS), and CPoS member Omar Adlan, to report to the security office in Singa on Thursday morning.

They were detained and transferred to Khartoum that evening, Mohamed Adam, head of the defence team, told this station.

He described the transferral as “a lack of respect for the sovereignty of the executive and legislative authorities, after the NISS filed a complaint against the accused, thus handing them to the judiciary”.

The five opposition leaders were held in the Sennar capital of Singa on January 31, together with eight others, because they participated in a public protest against the recent austerity measures of the Sudanese government.

They were charged with rioting and causing public nuisance. Four of them were released the next day. Eight others, among them Adam and El Naeem, on February 7. The last detainee, Munir Abdallah Mohamed, student at the Faculty of Education of the University of Sennar, was discharged from NISS custody on Thursday.